


find a way to more than survive

by AllegedlyAnnie



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Gen, Mortal Andy | Andromache of Scythia, Post-Canon, Sequel, Traumatized Quynh | Noriko
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-04
Updated: 2020-11-04
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:34:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27378805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AllegedlyAnnie/pseuds/AllegedlyAnnie
Summary: When he’s just a few feet away, the door opens, and in walks the worst-case scenario.The man who enters the room looks wildly out of place despite his fancy tuxedo. The woman on his arm, wearing a gown the color of fresh blood with her perfectly black hair elaborately arranged, looks radiant. Time slows down as Booker looks up and makes eye contact with Nile, his mouth forming a surprised little ‘oh’.Then, Quynh follows his gaze, her eyes landing on Nile, and all of the air is sucked out of the room.Quynh gets pulled out of the ocean with murder on her mind, and she decides Booker is the person to help her. Booker is understandably not jazzed about this idea, especially when he finds out that the person Quynh wants to kill is Andy.
Relationships: Booker | Sebastien le Livre & Quynh | Noriko
Comments: 6
Kudos: 34





	find a way to more than survive

**Author's Note:**

> I've spent a lot of time thinking about Nile describing about the impression that she got of Quynh in her dream, and I feel like that woman's got a lot of trauma that she's going to need help navigating. Booker is probably the absolute worst person to help with that! Can't wait to see how bad it's gonna go! (I promise, she will get help eventually.)
> 
> Anyway, the actual sequel is probably not going to go this way, but we're just here to have fun. Tags and relationships will probably change as we get further in. This is unbeta'd, so any mistakes are on me.

Nile is coming to a realization that she wishes she’d had hours ago: this dress is uncomfortable as hell.

It started out as just the most minor itch at the middle of her back, right where the bottom of the zipper falls. She didn’t even notice when she’d put the dress on, too caught up in how it caught the light and made her look more glamorous than she ever had in her life. The fact that it offered her no protection whatsoever--the back of the dress was four inches wide, for crying out loud--was also not part of the equation until much later.

Coming out of the bathroom, Nile couldn’t quite make eye contact with the others until Joe whistled, at which point she looked up to find all three of them staring at her.

“Damn,” was all Andy had said.

Slightly more eloquent, Joe added, “Gold is your color.”

Nile gave him a pointed look and replied, “Okay, humble brag.” At his furrowed brow, she added, “You picked it, man.”

He smiled and folded his hands behind his head, looking immensely proud of himself. “Oh, yeah. I did.”

Andy rolled her eyes, fighting down a smile of her own. “Anyway, it’ll do,” she said. High praise indeed, Nile thought dryly.

Nicky sat up in his chair and said, “You look lovely, Nile. How does it feel? Can you move in it?”

She looked down at herself, glimmering and beautiful, and said, “Yeah, it’s perfect.”

Idiot.

This party is like something out of a movie: everyone is wearing clothes that probably cost more than her annual salary in the Marines. The mansion is decorated with the kind of tastefulness that requires obscene amounts of wealth and a team of top-notch interior designers. She’s just caught the eye of the host, a man in his forties whose salt and pepper hair would probably put George Clooney to shame, if only his face matched it. She’s ready to beg for death if it gets her out of this dress and into pajamas. And it’s about to get worse.

Nile’s been circling the place for hours in a route carefully calculated to draw the attention of the aforementioned host, who is the head of an illicit arms smuggling operation that Copley found three months ago. She’s been pretending to nurse glasses of champagne, danced with anyone who asked her, and if this experience felt fun when she started, that is a distant memory now. But it’s going to pay off if she can get this guy away from the party, up to his office where she can unlock the window and let the others in to do their work.

He’s coming over--fucking finally--checking her out while Nile pretends not to notice. When he’s just a few feet away, the door opens, and in walks the worst-case scenario.

The man who enters the room looks wildly out of place despite his fancy tuxedo; his sandy, normally floppy hair is slicked back in a way that would be very suave if not for the almost palpable discomfort. The woman on his arm, wearing a gown the color of fresh blood with her perfectly black hair elaborately arranged, looks radiant. Time slows down as Booker looks up and makes eye contact with Nile, his mouth forming a surprised little ‘oh’. He looks exhausted as always, and her heart aches to look at him, as it always does when she thinks about Booker.

Then, Quynh follows his gaze, her eyes landing on Nile, and all of the air is sucked out of the room. Nile feels pinned, unprotected, ridiculous in her flimsy golden gown. They are both walking towards her, and her heart is racing--

Let’s back up.

Let’s back up to an apartment in France, a drunkard and an iron maiden in a shabby kitchen.

No, farther.

Let’s back up to the middle of the night in a safe house in the Italian countryside. Two men sleep nestled in a cot meant for one, as they usually do. A woman with short, dark hair is slumped in a sagging armchair. (She will regret this when she wakes up; her aches no longer disappear as they did for thousands of years.) A younger woman, dark-skinned, with her hair in braids, is sleeping on the couch, brow furrowing in a dream that is rapidly turning into something worse.

This is not the first dream that she’s had like this, but it quickly crosses into unfamiliar territory. In flashes, she sees a woman, living and dying over and over in deep water, her screams coming out as bubbles of air. This, unfortunately, is the familiar part. Then, she sees a box being pulled up from the ocean, a box shaped in a rough approximation of a wailing woman, though the detail has long since been worn away from the face of it. There is no movement inside the box. She sees the box pulled from a ship, brought to a building. She sees the box opened.

The woman inside the box opens her eyes, and then she flings herself from the depths of her prison, sending it crashing to the floor. She grabs the first sharp thing that she can get her hands on, and she sets upon the person standing closest to her, a man in a lab coat who dies trying to escape.

Nile wakes up screaming.

It takes a while for them to calm her down, and then longer to actually pull a coherent explanation out of her. At first, all she can manage between ragged, gasping breaths, is, “Quynh...”

Andy gets up, looking wretched, and pours herself a drink, which she throws back without hesitation. Joe spares her a glance from his position sitting next to Nile on the couch. Nicky is on her other side with his arm around her shoulders.

When Nile is finally calm enough to speak, she mumbles, “Quynh is out. Someone found her.” She’s curled up into herself, staring at the floor.

“What happened?” Andy asks from where she’s standing next to the kitchen table. Nile doesn’t look up.

“I didn’t get all of it, just flashes. Someone pulled the box up, took her back to a building. When they opened the box, she…”

“She what?” No answer. “Nile, she what?”

Finally, Nile looks up at her. She is hollowed out, tears still drying on her cheeks. Her voice shakes as she says, “She killed them.”

The room is quiet for a long moment. All three of the others would love to deny what Nile dreamed, to assure her that it must have been a figment of her imagination, and not the prophetic vision that they know it to be. But they all know it would be a lie, and no one wants to admit that it’s just about exactly what they would expect from someone who spent the last five hundred years in the ocean.

They’re also carefully not talking about the fact that someone found Quynh, and it wasn’t Andy. Nile is watching her process this information, and she looks...bad. Like she did when they were trying to find Merrick. She’s staring at the wall with the expression of someone who doesn’t recognize the world that she’s found herself in and doesn’t particularly want to be there, but she’s also been repressing her emotions for so long that she’s not even sure how to have a breakdown any more. The fragility of Andy’s composure hurts to even look at.

Finally, Nicky clears his throat. His eyes are too bright, but that’s the least important thing that they’re not talking about right now. He says, “We have to find her.”

There it is. A truth so simple that it’s almost ludicrous to say it out loud, but someone had to say it.

Joe agrees, “She needs us. She’s going to need help.”

Andy tears her gaze away from the crack in the stucco wall and shares a look with Nile, neither of them needing to articulate to the other exactly what they’re thinking. Nile knows it because she felt it in her dream; Andy knows it because knowing Quynh was as automatic as breathing to her for the years that they traveled together, and she’s spent the last half-millenium gasping for air without her. After a moment, Nile raises one eyebrow marginally, and Andy, looking pale and small and tired, says, “She’ll find us.”

Joe looks up at her, eyebrows going up. “Say again, boss?”

“I said, she’ll find us.”

“Are you serious? She’ll never survive out there. She’s been drowning for hundreds of years, she’s not going to have any idea how the world works any more. We’ve been living in it every day, and we barely know how it works!”

“Quynh’s adaptable.”

“Yeah, in the fifteenth century, she was!”

“Joe…”

“What? I’m right!”

“She wants to kill Andy,” Nile cuts in. She says it quietly, staring at her hands, but she may as well have shouted it and smashed a glass on the floor, for the effect that it has on the room. A glance to each side is enough to tell that Joe and Nicky are staring at her.

Nicky shakes his head a little and reasons, “That does not make sense. Quynh loves Andy. And even if she didn’t, as far as she knows, killing her would not make a difference...”

Nile shrugs. “She’s not exactly in her best state of mind, you know? After you drown enough times, you start to lose track of what’s rational. You start looking for someone to blame. All she was thinking about was making Andy hurt, and if part of that involves killing her, she’s going to get her wish real fast.”

Nicky rubs his mouth and asks, “So, what do we do then?”

Andy takes a breath to say something, but Nile cuts in again before she gets a chance: “We keep Andy safe. We don’t take unnecessary risks.”

Andy winces. “No, Nile, come on. I’m not playing the princess in the tower here--”

“It’s as much for her as for you,” Nile counters, firm. “If she kills you, and you don’t come back, that’s gonna fuck her up even worse.”

Joe adds, “Maybe if we can talk to her, we can change her mind.”

Andy throws her hands up. “Maybe if I grew wings, I’d be a bird! I’m not going to hide in safe houses and wait for someone else to...fix this for me. Look, if she wants me, she’s going to find me one way or another. And until then, we’re going to keep doing what we do, like always.”

Nile tries again: “Andy—“

“No. I want her to find us. After everything, it’s the least I can do. And if she wants to kill me...we’ll see where it goes.”

“You want to martyr yourself,” Nicky corrects, just a little sharp.

“Well, you’d know all about martyrs, right?” Andy shoots back.

“Yes,” Nicky says simply. The two of them stare at each other for a second, and then Nicky is up and crossing the room and pulling her into a hug. Andy hugs him back like it’s exactly what she needed, a lifeline tossed to a flagging swimmer, and even though she’s still staring through the wall over his shoulder, some of the tension leaves her body. In the perfect quiet of this moment, her ragged breathing is the only sound. They don’t talk about that either.

Sleep is out of the question after that. The four of them pile onto the couch instead, a tangle of limbs. They turn the television on and put the volume down low, and they speak softly. Andy ends up more or less getting her way, in that she isn’t confined to the safehouse, but Joe sets the condition that at least one of them has to be with her when they’re out. Nile and Andy both grumble over the compromise for opposite reasons, but none of them have the energy to really argue any more, and as Andy points out, “Even without my immortality, I can still kick any of your asses, so I’ll be fine.”

False bravado tends to ring hollow in the time between three and four o’clock in the morning, but it’s ultimately her choice, so they add it to the growing list of things that they’re not talking about, and Nile just sighs, “Alright. You’re the boss.”

Finally, Andy smiles, and she answers, “Yes, I am.”

Two weeks later, Quynh finds Booker.

\---

Booker has been dreaming about this woman for over two hundred years. He’s heard stories about her, usually from Nicky, who speaks her name with heartbreaking fondness. He’s seen Joe’s drawings and paintings of her, kept tucked away like precious heirlooms. He’s seen the ghost of her flitting behind Andy’s eyes. The specter of Quynh has been a constant in Booker’s life, and he is so. Fucking. Sick of it.

And now she is standing in his kitchen.

He learned a long time ago that if he drinks enough, he won’t dream, and though he didn’t used to put that knowledge into practice too frequently, the last six months have been a marked exception. Distantly, Booker thinks that this might have been a mistake on his part, as he’s clearly missed some very important developments.

But here she is, in his kitchen, which has a week’s worth of dishes in the sink and leftovers in the fridge that might be developing sentient life, and somehow Nicky’s stories and Joe’s paintings never quite captured how much Quynh is...threat-shaped. Not that she’s not beautiful, because she is. She has a lovely smile, and her voice is soft as she says his name, but she got thrown into the ocean during the reign of Henry VIII, and somehow she escaped that and is not a gibbering wreck in an asylum somewhere. She broke into his apartment wearing a turtleneck, for god’s sake. If this isn’t a woman to be scared of, Booker has no idea who he should be scared of.

Still, in spite of that, he steps into the apartment and closes the door behind him, lowers his gun even though his animal instincts are screaming at him to shoot her between the eyes and disappear before she comes back to life. Hard to say whether it’s because he’s drunk and not thinking clearly, or if he’s just taken leave of his senses and his self-preservation instinct after two hundred years with Andy. Quynh watches him with bright eyes, looking pleasantly interested in what he’ll do next.

“How’d you find me?” he asks.

“I was dreaming about you,” she says, like that answers anything. He nods anyway.

“Okay. _Why’d_ you find me?”

“I wanted to meet you. We are family.”

Booker scoffs a little, glancing away, bitterness and hurt rising from his chest like smoke. “I guess you’re not up on current events, are you?” he asks.

“Do you mean, do I not know that you are by yourself?”

He looks at her again and catches it just a second too late, the first sign of her intent. She crosses the space like a phantom, too fast for his weary eyes to track, and then she places her hands on both sides of his face. Her touch is almost gentle, a lover’s caress--until she jerks his head to the side and snaps his neck.

There’s a lightning flash of pain, and then blessed oblivion. It’s the first time that he’s died since beginning his one-hundred-year penance. Not for lack of desire to die, because the idea of not having to exist, even if just for a couple of minutes, is extremely appealing. But every time that he gets close, Andy’s face swims into his mind, her tenuous composure the last time he saw her. And fuck, Booker wants so desperately to be worth the grief she showed for him. So he had been trying, trying to make his shame mean something, trying not to do such a shit job of it, as she had said. Until now.

It’s not like Booker forgot that coming back to life hurts; on the contrary, some of the worst experiences he’s ever had have been coming back to life. He is viscerally aware that it sucks. But it’s been a while since anyone broke his neck, and he had managed to put a little distance between himself and the feeling of his vertebrae realigning. His head turns involuntarily as his spine puts itself back together, and yeah, he didn’t miss that one little bit.

He sits up to find Quynh standing at the sink, her back to him. It takes him a second to understand what she’s doing, and then she puts aside an empty bottle, drops of amber liquid still clinging to the inside, and she picks up a green glass bottle.

“Fuck--” he manages, pulling himself up to stand with all the grace of a medicated cat. “Don’t--don’t do that.”

She doesn’t even look around, just tells him in that crisp way, “You need to stop drinking.” She’s pouring his goddamn wine down the sink.

“Listen, I won’t drink so much, just don’t--”

Quynh unceremoniously drops the bottle in the sink and turns on him, getting right into his personal space, forcing him back until he bumps into the table. Even through his recently-dead-and-still-drunk haze, Booker can see that her eyes seem to shine with a far stranger light than just the afternoon sun through the kitchen window; it hardly takes a genius to tell that the thread that she’s holding on by is very thin indeed. Instinctively, he holds up his hands, a large dog knowing he’s outmatched in the face of a spitting-mad housecat.

“You will stop. Because I need you focused,” she commands.

“Focused for what?” Booker asks, knowing he’ll regret it.

She smiles thinly, and maybe there’s not even a thread for her to hold on to anymore, maybe she’s lost at sea still, because she says, quite calmly, “I’m going to make Andromache pay.”

Which...is a problem. For multiple reasons.

Problem number one, most obviously and most importantly, is Andy’s newly minted mortality. Problem number two is that Quynh clearly has a lot going on, and there’s a strong case to be made for her being completely unhinged. Problem number three is that Booker can’t even tell any of the others about it. Not because of his exile, which he would break in one second flat if it would save Andy’s life, and damn the consequences. But because he has no means to contact any of the others.

See, at his core, Booker is not great at conceptualizing the consequences of his actions, which is what led to his current predicament in the first place. After one week of being by himself, he had looked at his phone, containing the means to contact every person that he cared about on this bitch of an earth, and it was like the damn thing was laughing at him. Teasing him with what he couldn’t have. And what would it matter anyway, since he couldn’t talk to any of them for a hundred years?

So...he had smashed it. And then smashed it some more, and then he had taken a hammer and pummelled the pieces that remained until they were unrecognizable as ever having been one whole object, let alone a cell phone. After that, he passed out in the debris, and when he woke up and sobered up, he had some regrets, but not nearly as many as he has now.

Reflexively, he swallows. “It’s not like you can kill her,” he points out, in what he hopes is a composed and rational voice. It comes out a little strangled still.

“On the contrary,” Quynh says, “of course I can kill her.”

“But why?”

“Because it was her fault!” Quynh’s voice finally starts to rise, and when it gets higher, the brittleness of her facade becomes obvious. “She let them take me, and then she left me there! She left me at the bottom of the ocean to die over and over again...do you know what that feels like, Booker?”

He has some idea, having dreamed her so many times, but certainly no personal experience. Instead he tries to reason with her: “She tried to find you. Her and Joe and Nicky, they all tried to find you for years.”

Quynh pauses, brow wrinkling a little, thrown off-track. “Joe and Nicky?” she asks skeptically.

“Yusuf and Nicolo,” he amends.

The consternation clears, and instead she smiles thinly. “Yusuf and Nicolo are young,” she informs him. Before Booker can point out that they’re both over nine hundred years old now, she continues, “And they did not promise to stay with me the way Andromache did. They did not abandon me. I’m sure that was Andromache’s choice, to stop looking, wasn’t it? Of course it was. They listen to her like children, they do what she tells them.”

Then, Quynh stops and seems to remember that she was going somewhere with this, fixes him with a look. “Andromache abandoned you too,” she says, and oh, if only she knew how wrong she was.

Booker looks down, trying very hard for once to predict how this could go. He could tell her what really happened, in which case the best case scenario is probably that she’ll leave, and the worst case is that she’ll kill him again on her way out. Or he could agree with her and help her find the others, try to find a way to warn them before Quynh makes good on her promise. If he goes with the former, she’ll be in the wind, unpredictable. If he goes with the latter...well, she’ll still be in his apartment, and that’s a slightly queasy thought, but better than the alternative. At least then he’ll be able to try and steer her path, as much as anyone can steer the path of a hurricane.

“She did abandon me,” he allows, hating himself for saying it.

Quynh asks, “So, don’t you want revenge?”

Booker nods, slowly at first, and then with more conviction. “Yes,” he answers, feeling sick in a way that has nothing to do with how much he’s had to drink. Just saying it out loud feels like betraying his best friend, his sister, all over again. If this goes wrong, he’s going to put himself in an iron maiden and have Joe and Nicky push him into the sea. If this goes wrong, neither of them will need much persuasion.

She smiles her beautiful, terrifying smile. She has very nice teeth, he thinks distantly, trying to focus on something other than what a monumental mistake he’s probably just made. How are her teeth so white and straight, when she’s spent hundreds of years in the ocean? Does the force that governs their lives also control their dental hygiene? Why has he been bothering to brush his teeth all these years?

Quynh pulls him from his thoughts once again with a hand on his cheek. He tries not to flinch, but the curl at the corner of her lip seems to indicate that he wasn’t entirely successful.

“Well then, let’s find her.”

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from "Sure Hope We Survive" by Humming House, which is a banger, and I highly recommend it.
> 
> I hope you all enjoyed! Comments are highly appreciated. Hopefully, the next chapter will be up soon!


End file.
